A wide array of mobile clients, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular telephones, include a display screen for displaying streaming video content. With the expanded bandwidth of wireless networks (e.g., 3G wireless networks), it was believed that streaming video would occupy the vast majority of wireless media. However, the fastest-growing applications have instead been in the arena of mobile network games based on three-dimensional (3D) graphics models. For instance, in countries such as Korea and Japan, the use of mobile network games has increased such that there is a substantial desire to access mobile network games using mobile electronic devices.
Mobile network games require real-time interactivity, which demands high-volume and timely delivered data. This is a difficult task for the current 3G wireless network real-time mechanism. Moreover, typical mobile clients are low-powered lightweight devices with limited computing resources; therefore, they lack the ability to render the millions of triangles per second typically necessary for high quality graphics. As a result, current mobile online games are typically limited in group size and interaction, and are simplistic in visual quality.
In order to improve the quality of mobile online games, a fundamental advance in wireless network technology and a drastic speedup in mobile computing hardware are required. However, game observers comprise a large and growing set of mobile client users. Game observers are users that access network games as non-participants who are interested only in viewing the action. As network games mature, highly skilled players acquire fan bases that loyally follow and observe their heroes in action en masse in multicast channels.
Currently, mobile network game observers are subject to the same limitations as active game participants. Specifically, in order to observe a network game, the observer's mobile client typically must meet the hardware requirements necessary to display 3D graphics. However, as describe above, typical mobile clients do not include hardware capable of rendering high-quality 3D graphics. Accordingly, mobile game observers are limited to viewing mobile online games, which are often less compelling and have simplistic graphics, and therefore less desirable to observe.